The workers in the empire’s core are experiencing a backlash from our ruling class, one that’s going to last indefinitely and is accelerating our society’s collapse. The event which the big capitalists are reacting to is how the pandemic gave workers new leverage in the labor market; the pendulum swung in the proletariat’s direction, creating an employment ratio where employers needed to compete for job seekers. When entities like Bank of America saw this happen, they threw the ultimate tantrum.
According to Bank of America’s summer 2022 economic memo, big capital’s desire was for unemployment to rise, with the rationale being that wage growth was supposedly driving the inflation. The memo exaggerated the rate of wage growth, while ignoring how rising profits were the true source of the price increases; the workers were the scapegoat, and the plot to harm their living conditions wasn’t even truly motivated by inflation concerns. Our class enemies are blowing up the economy because to keep the system going amid capitalism’s crises, there needs to be a degrowth; a sacrifice of ever-more people, economically and therefore physically.
As part of this plan, the Fed raised interest rates, putting pressure on employers to shrink their work forces; year after year, they kept seeing the economy fail to recover from 2020’s shock, so they concluded that they had too many workers. Instead of mass firings, which would have been bad for PR, they made it so that hiring new people was the exception; when workers retired, they usually weren’t getting replaced, and in every possible area the amount of available jobs was reduced. That’s how we got to where we are now, in which a recession has effectively already been happening for a while; the official unemployment rate confirms that joblessness is going up, hinting at the hidden realities which the real unemployment rate reveals. The true rate of people who lack access to the jobs they need is now 23.9%, up by almost 2% from what it was in June of last year. The trend is that Bank of America’s plot to engineer unemployment has become increasingly successful; and this is just the start of what our class enemies intend to do.
From their perspective, the workforce is still too large; it’s bigger than it was prior to the pandemic, and since then degrowth has become an even greater priority. The pandemic had effects that were unexpected for the monopolists, despite how much they were able to profit from it; as it created that moment of worker empowerment, it sped up de-dollarization, slowing global exchange and compelling more countries to pursue alternative currencies. The speed of de-dollarization shouldn’t be exaggerated; it is causing the imperialists anxiety, though, which is driving their warfare escalations.
We’re going to see more of these escalations under Trump, and in a more chaotic form. While the tariffs exacerbate all problems for U.S. workers, the combination of unemployment and inflation is going to create crises that our enemies aim to take advantage of. The hope shared by Trump’s team, and by the rest of the super-rich, is for a new economic calamity to bring them another massive financial infusion. They’re trying to create the pretext for a new bailout, which would multiply inequality and necessitate more radical crisis management measures. Measures like a big war, likely to take place in east Asia, and an explosion in austerity. For the workers, it will effectively be an economic collapse, except their government will be able to say it’s not one because the monopolists have profited from it. Or at least that’s the narrative our rulers will push for as long as they can, until the engineered collapse gets to its next stage.
Our only path forward is to turn this world war into a class war. To translate the destruction brought by our ruling class, both abroad and within our own country, into the masses mobilizing for the capitalist state’s overthrow. This worldwide imperial destruction is absolutely coming for our communities in the United States; it’s already here, just in a mild form compared to what things are going to look like. The USA’s people will need to survive societal breakdown, ecological crisis, and many different types of civil conflict. The civil war aspect isn’t going to look like civil wars traditionally have; it will look like a heightened version of the reality we have to navigate now, where men and some women get radicalized to commit acts of violence. The goal is to feed into society’s anger and alienation, getting people to turn on each other instead of pursuing collective action.
The cultural phenomenon around Luigi Mangione is absolutely an example of this. The conversations he’s created about for-profit healthcare and class are being redirected towards an ideology of ultraviolence; for these conversations to inspire truly productive actions, it will be in spite of the adventuristic and individualistic views that he represents. Part of the message he conveyed through his action was that when somebody engages in lone wolf violence against individuals, it’s necessarily a blow towards the system, when in fact this tactic never brings any systemic victory; it’s a diversion from actual class struggle, one that could easily be weaponized against the proletariat. It’s not something the state has a real reason to fear, unlike pro-Palestine organizing, labor organizing, or the other mass efforts which have been truly disrupting capital.
The state wants us to gravitate towards ultraviolent ideas, because this actively impedes our potential journeys towards taking part in serious power-building. And should these ideas successfully inspire copycat violence, the only effect this will have is to perpetuate the mistaken thinking. It will also give the state another pretext for exacting violence against the masses, who won’t be able to defend themselves if we don’t focus on organizational work.
Only through building solid institutions, with operational security and substantial ties to the working masses, can we win this fight. We will find plenty of popular support for this endeavor, so long as we properly understand what the objectives are. The goal is not to fight for its own sake; as Fred Hampton said, “We do not support people who are anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic,” with wanton violence representing a certain type of opportunism. The goal is to give the people the tools required for overthrowing the state, which means acting as servants of the masses rather than going ahead of them. Something that will truly gain you the people’s support is advancing their material needs, and doing so in a way that exposes the state’s failures to provide; this is what communists are increasingly doing.
If this practice comes with an analysis of U.S. imperialism that’s dialectical, and that recognizes how these wars are hurting the people, then we’ll be able to translate the mutual aid into an expanded anti-imperialist movement. There are other essential ingredients to building the institutions we need; serious connections with unions, instituting internal cadre training regimens, building broad anti-imperialist coalitions. It is complex, and it’s a learning process, but there’s no option besides this. This is how we can turn our era’s austerity and war into developments that genuinely endanger the rule of capital. Those behind the collapse are depending on the present power balance staying the same, and no serious revolutionary project coming into being. That way, the people won’t have any effective way to respond to the warfare being waged against them. We can hand the masses such a means for gaining power.
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